Abstract: This month we highlight Kevin Wang, a long-time contributor to the CNCF community, head of Huawei’s Cloud native Open Source team, and co-founder of KubeEdge and Volcano projects.

Kevin answered several questions about his experiences in the CNCF community over the past five years.

CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

Founded in December 2015, it is a non-profit organization affiliated with the Linux Foundation.

CNCF

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is dedicated to fostering and maintaining a vendor-neutral open source ecosystem to promote cloud native technologies. Make these innovations available to the masses by democratizing cutting-edge models.

Tell us how you got involved with the CNCF community.

My journey with Kubernetes and the CNCF community began in 2015. At the time, I was helping some customers migrate their legacy businesses to the cloud. In my work, I identified some features of Kubernetes that needed to be enhanced and started contributing to the community.

The Kubernetes community is the most open source community I have ever seen. Kubernetes welcomes me to discuss issues, submit proposals, send Pull Requests and post comments. I am one of the first Chinese maintainers to make a major contribution to Kubernetes. Between 2015 and 2018, I led the development of several advanced scheduling features and subprojects for Kubernetes.

In 2018, while helping clients build business applications on the edge, I co-founded **KubeEdge[1]** open source project with my colleagues. The project became CNCF’s first open source project to apply cloud native technology to edge computing.

Another exciting open source project I have co-sponsored is Volcano[2], CNCF’s first cloud-native bulk computing project that helps workloads such as AI, big data and HIGH performance computing run better on CNCF’s technology stack. Volcano opened source in 2019 and was donated to CNCF in April 2020.

What are the benefits of being part of CNCF for these projects?

Since joining CNCF, KubeEdge has received contributions from more than 550 contributors and 50 organizations worldwide, and was promoted to the incubation stage in September 2020.

At present, KubeEdge has been widely used in transportation, energy, Internet, CDN, industrial manufacturing, intelligent park and other industries. In China’s provincial boundary expressway electronic Toll collection system (ETC), KubeEdge helps manage about 100,000 edge nodes and more than 500,000 edge applications in 29 of 34 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. With these applications, the system processes more than 300 million pieces of data per day, improving traffic efficiency at toll booths by 10 times.

Since joining CNCF, Volcano has integrated many mainstream computing frameworks and communities in the industry. Including TensorFlow, PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, MXNet, Spark, Flink, OpenMPI, Kubeflow, Horovod, Cromwell, Argo, MindSpore, etc. Currently, in less than a year since it became the CNCF project, Volcano has also helped many end users such as IQiyi, CCB Fintech and Ruitian Investment. Migrate their deep learning, big data, HPC infrastructure from Mesos, Yarn, etc to a cloud-native infrastructure with Kubernetes at its core.

How has open source helped your career?

Open source provides a great environment for technology practitioners to grow. I personally benefited from contributing to the open source community. In turn, I have helped many people join and contribute to the open source community.

In 2018, I became a CONTRIBUTOR to THE CNCF TOC (Technical Oversight Committee) and led many community events in China to help the CNCF community develop China’s ecology. Since then, I’ve mentored more than 20 developers from different organizations, Help them become Maintainer, Approver, Reviewer and Member of CNCF projects including Kubernetes and its subprojects, KubeEdge, Volcano, etc.

The appeal of open source is not only in code development activities, but also in communicating with developers around the world, sharing new technology trends, implementing experiences, discussing problems and challenges, and participating in many other community events.

In 2018, I launched the “Cloud Native Days China” meetup series and the “Cloud Native Lives” webinar series. So far, more than 20,000 Chinese developers have participated in the event, which helps them understand and participate in cloud native technology and open source projects. It is worth mentioning that we hold events not only in first-tier cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, but also in many second – and third-tier cities to help developers there learn about cutting-edge technologies.

In 2020, the KubeCon Summit could not be held as scheduled due to the impact of COVID-19. This is a great loss to the community as China is not only the second largest contributor to Kubernetes but also a key part of the global community. Therefore, I gathered community members in China and cooperated with CNCF to create and host the “Cloud Native + Open Source Virtual Summit China 2020” online Summit. The conference was attended by more than 5,800 people (96% from China), 17 sponsors and 9 community partners. In addition, over 120,000 viewers watched the live broadcast during the three-day event. Finally, we had 27 media and analysts participating and published 324 media articles.

In addition to these activities in China, I have served on the Program Committee of KubeCon Global Summit several times, helping to promote the development of the entire CNCF community on a global scale.

Any last words to share?

Currently, I am running for THE CNCF TOC election.

If elected to TOC, I will use this opportunity to bring the voices of contributors and end users, especially from China, to TOC and will help drive more contributions and adoption from China to CNCF projects. I want to provide a neutral voice to help the community resolve non-technical disputes. In addition, I pledge to make every effort to create a healthy environment for contributors, end users, and suppliers.

I am passionate about open source and the value we create together at CNCF. In fact, I put 100% of my energy into working on the open source cloud native community. In addition to contributing to and driving the advancement of cloud technology, I am also committed to helping the CNCF community grow in China to enhance the diversity of our global community.

The resources

[1]KubeEdge:kubeedge.io/

[2]Volcano:volcano.sh/

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